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ben_miller 's review for:
A Rising Man
by Abir Mukherjee
Calcutta (known as Kolkata these days) seems to be the home of the Indian whodunnit. The country's two most famous fictional detectives—Byomkesh Bakshi and Feluda—both hail from the Bengali city, where they unravel a variety of dastardly golden-age plots: poisonings, locked-room murders, and inheritance scams.
A Rising Man is a different kind of entry in the annals of Calcuttan crime lore. Instead of taking the Conan Doyle/Agatha Christie path, in which a brilliant but idiosyncratic private investigator cleverly undoes the work of a scheming mastermind, Abir Mukherjee gives us a police procedural bound up in the politics of the Raj.
It starts off unpromisingly, to be honest: a paint-by-numbers setup with a dead body in an alley, a detective with a troubled past, and stiff prose that feels like the work of a debut author who's spent twenty years in finance, as his bio rather strangely informs us.
Thankfully, it gets better. Sam Wyndham, our white detective/narrator, grows less bland as he begins to grapple with the fundamental contradiction of his dual role as seeker of justice and agent of empire. His right-hand-man, "Surrender-not" Banerjee, likewise must confront a crisis of conscience. And the mystery itself is compelling. Even if parts of the resolution felt contrived, it held my interest and kept me guessing.
Best of all, as the book went on I began to appreciate how skillful some of the writing actually was. The romantic elements were pretty clumsy, and Mukherjee has an irritating habit of stating the obvious, especially in dialogue, but the setting of early 20th century Calcutta is evoked with a power and richness that kind of sneaks up on you. Toward the end, when Wyndham and Surrender-not take a boat trip up the Hooghly River, we are shown what Wyndham calls "the India I'd dreamed of," a vision of low, shrouding mist, Kali temples jutting up from jungle, votive offerings drifting on the water. It dawned on me that Mukherjee had earned this moment of otherworldly exoticism by doing the hard work of the previous 300 pages—building a Calcutta that felt real, lived-in, and complex. In other words, the sort of place a person could toil, make their fortune, or get themselves murdered in.
More good news: It looks like there are already two more entries in this series.
A Rising Man is a different kind of entry in the annals of Calcuttan crime lore. Instead of taking the Conan Doyle/Agatha Christie path, in which a brilliant but idiosyncratic private investigator cleverly undoes the work of a scheming mastermind, Abir Mukherjee gives us a police procedural bound up in the politics of the Raj.
It starts off unpromisingly, to be honest: a paint-by-numbers setup with a dead body in an alley, a detective with a troubled past, and stiff prose that feels like the work of a debut author who's spent twenty years in finance, as his bio rather strangely informs us.
Thankfully, it gets better. Sam Wyndham, our white detective/narrator, grows less bland as he begins to grapple with the fundamental contradiction of his dual role as seeker of justice and agent of empire. His right-hand-man, "Surrender-not" Banerjee, likewise must confront a crisis of conscience. And the mystery itself is compelling. Even if parts of the resolution felt contrived, it held my interest and kept me guessing.
Best of all, as the book went on I began to appreciate how skillful some of the writing actually was. The romantic elements were pretty clumsy, and Mukherjee has an irritating habit of stating the obvious, especially in dialogue, but the setting of early 20th century Calcutta is evoked with a power and richness that kind of sneaks up on you. Toward the end, when Wyndham and Surrender-not take a boat trip up the Hooghly River, we are shown what Wyndham calls "the India I'd dreamed of," a vision of low, shrouding mist, Kali temples jutting up from jungle, votive offerings drifting on the water. It dawned on me that Mukherjee had earned this moment of otherworldly exoticism by doing the hard work of the previous 300 pages—building a Calcutta that felt real, lived-in, and complex. In other words, the sort of place a person could toil, make their fortune, or get themselves murdered in.
More good news: It looks like there are already two more entries in this series.